Various Artists

The Conet Project

Irdial;
1997/2004

Find it at:

In the world of electronics, radio is an old technology, but it still holds a special allure. Forget
the closed-circuits and dishes that only catch electromagnetic rain with proper positioning and decoders;
radio is powerful because, with the right kind of tuner, you always can connect with somebody, somewhere.
Shortwave radio has an even more remarkable omnipresence. It works by reflecting between the
ionosphere and the earth's surface, allowing signals to travel over curved surfaces and bounce from
continent to continent, and its band is filled with unfamiliar voices and music from the world over.

Shortwave radio hams speak of the unexplained phenomenon of "numbers stations." These mysterious broadcasts
contain seemingly random chunks of repeating data-- usually a lone voice reading a string of numbers or
letters, but sometimes it's simply electronic tones or bits of music. It is generally understood (though
never formerly acknowledged) that numbers stations are encrypted messages broadcast by various governments
for some unknown purpose-- most likely espionage. They may be instructions to undercover agents in the
field (the CIA, MOSSAD, KGB, and so on), and involve commands encoded and decoded according to an understood
key.

The Conet Project is a collection of numbers stations recordings first issued in the late 90s and
now officially back in print. Its blip of mainstream notoriety came when Wilco sampled a track from the
set (a woman's voice intoning "yankee... hotel... foxtrot...") for the closing moments of "Poor Places",
providing the title for Wilco's best-known album. The Conet Project is an unusual collection to
say the least. It's extremely long (four discs), expensive, and contains insanely thorough documentation--
the 70-page booklet assumes a working knowledge of cryptography lingo, and explains why shortwave is such
a secure and efficient medium for exchange of encrypted information. Of course, something about preserving
this stuff on CD seems anachronistic in light of current technology-- people trade numbers stations recordings
by CD-R and share them online-- but if the jury is out on The Conet Project as a commercial product,
there is certainly much here to enjoy.

First, even when stripped of the important political context, these CDs are interesting on a purely textural
level. Anyone inured to the sonic pleasures of imperfect technology will find a lot to love in these extremely
low fidelity recordings, which were packed tightly to travel halfway around the world and remain intelligible
on the receiving end. Voices sound pinched and claustrophobic forced into the narrow band of the medium,
and each sound carries with a layer of distortion. A slight but delicious warble is constantly present,
an effect more pronounced when music or electronic tones (great primitive synth sounds abound) take over
the voices. And every broadcast is carried along on a thick shag carpet of hum, buzz and crackle. If you
enjoy listening to recordings from the first 15 years of the space program-- those stony all-American voices
amid all that static, each transmission punctuated with the electronic beep-- then The Conet Project
has obvious appeal.

And then there are the voices. Steve Reich is inspired by the musicality of human speech ("Come Out",
"It's Gonna Rain", "Different Trains"), and The Conet Project provides a lot of raw material.
There are dozens of them here, in as many tongues as you can imagine, working through sequences of numbers
and letters with heavy repetition. Some of the broadcasts are either tape loops or some kind of triggered
sample, others seem to be read "live." The cumulative effect is hypnotic.

Once you've absorbed the sound and let the imagined content of these broadcasts sink in, The Conet
Project moves from interesting to fascinating. Remember why these broadcasts allegedly exist: to
instruct people to do harm. Even if espionage is in service of an ultimate good, the details of the
enterprise involve deception, betrayal, and occasionally, violence. Knowing that these unnervingly
dispassionate voices, reading endless streams of random numbers aloud, carry within them "plain text"
messages about assassination, terrorism-- you name it-- is creepy, voyeuristic and exhilarating. It's
an unblinking call for conspiracy, the paranoia of the Cold War boiled down to its essence. This is the
station tuned in by Bobby Fisher's silver fillings when he's having one of his "bad days," and that's
what the boys from Wilco heard. That voice in "Poor Places" is the black box inside the crashing plane,
holding the clues to why things went so desperately wrong.